Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
Following on from the last comment, Netcraft also have their server uptime report here.
The top 28 servers running continuously from between 1595 to 967 days all are running on some Un*x variant, such as FreeBSD.
You have to get to the 29th entry before you see the first Windows based server running on Windows 2000.
In total there are only 2 Windows based servers in the top 50…
Microsoft made a statement in its quarterly SEC filing regarding the pressure of Open Source Software on Microsoft’s current business model, and that it may be forced to reduce prices to compete.
So does Microsoft finally have a competitor that they are genuinely worried about? At least its a competitor that they can’t buy out financially as they have done with so many small companies in the past before they matured to the stage where they may have had competitive products.
The problem Microsoft faces I believe, is that despite the huge amounts of money that they can sink into a new or existing product and the hundreds or thousands of skilled developers they may have to work on their products, they cannot compete with the many thousands of highly skilled developers that are fanatical and deeply emotional about producing Open Source Software.
The result of such a deeply committed group of people working on for example Linux, is that the quality of software is so much higher than even Microsoft’s money can buy.
You only have to ask any Systems Admin guru who has worked with both Windows servers and Linux servers which is the most stable, and the answer will be Linux every time.
Need hard facts? According to Netcraft’s ongoing server survey, in Jan 2003 the most popular web server is still Apache with 62% of the total servers surveyed and still increasing, while Microsoft’s IIS is trailing at 27% and actually started to decline in that month. You can bet that the majority of the Apache servers are running on other platforms other than Microsoft…
So how can Microsoft compete with this? Buy out all the developers who are working for free and for the love of their OSS products? Well thats hardly likely, as they are working for free because that is the core philosophy behind the OSS movement… they are not doing this to make money.
So how can Microsoft compete? Maybe they can’t.
Sun is pushing out the final release of J2EE 1.4 to this summer, so they can incorporate any webservice security features that may be about to be proposed by the WS-I group.
The Proposed Final Draft 2 J2EE 1.4 spec has been available on the Java site since November 2002.